We recently spoke with author Howard Schaap about his new Slant book, Brooding Upon the Waters. 

Brooding Upon the Waters opens on a trip to Mayo Clinic to visit your father. Is that where the idea for the book actually originated?

I’d been thinking for a while about the time and place of where I grew up—in rural Minnesota in the 1980s, in the middle of what came to be called the farm crisis. For my MFA program, I had written an essay exploring one or two aspects of the experience. Then right at the end of my program, my father had this huge meltdown, his whole nervous system was just shutting down. The crisis of that month when he was in the hospital, the month before I graduated, just got me thinking about how we ended up there. I didn’t actually write anything more about it for two years.

A few months after I did start writing, the writer Kent Meyers came to the school where I teach and said something like, “We Midwesterners often don’t know our own stories.” And I thought that was so true with us and Dad. We had not really recognized his condition or its effect on us for years. “We don’t have it that bad,” “plenty of people have it a lot worse”—we lived for years saying things like that, avoiding actually getting him treatment. It was a way to sweep it under the rug, but it was also us not recognizing the story we were in.

Then, I also happened to pick up Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. And so much of the story I knew, not only about Dad and the economics of the farm crisis but also susceptibility to things like populism, was so close to what I had experienced over the years with Dad, I was just stunned. That’s when I thought, I don’t just have an individual story—there’s a trend in this place where I live.

That’s interesting, that “Midwesterners don’t know their own stories.” Is that fair?

I mean, I can’t say it’s true for everyone, obviously. But it was true in my case. And I see it in my students. They often don’t have a sense of the stories they’re living or have been connected to. That’s probably somewhat true everywhere, but it seems especially true here.

One of the conundrums of being Midwestern, at least for me, and probably of being rural, too, is that we might not know our own stories, and at the same time we can be afflicted by our stories. My dad could not get out of the fact that the failure of our farm wasn’t just his story, that it had happened to loads of farmers whose stories were similar to his—one domino tipped at the wrong time and everything fell apart. For him, it was only ever his individual failure.

On the other hand, one of my sisters, when I shared the manuscript with her, became very afraid for me, that I was getting sucked under by the whole overwhelming burden that Dad’s own story about his life became. She was afraid that now I was trying to shoulder that story instead of throwing it off, of living my own life. She recommended the Paul Schrader film Affliction, saying it reminded her of how Dad was so burdened with his own story and yet was so unselfaware.

And yet I think it’s part of survival strategy in the Midwest, to keep your own story at arm’s length, so it doesn’t overwhelm you. Some of this practice probably stems from the whims of weather and economics and politics in the Midwest. To stay, to try to put down roots in a place where it’s tricky to put down roots, is to be master of the shoulder shrug. We’re the masters of “Welp. There went that.” We have to be.

Your dad had bipolar disorder—

Bipolar 2.

Bipolar 2. What does that mean? And is Brooding Upon the Waters a mental health book?

My shorthand for bipolar 2 is that it’s the one with less ups and more downs. It is a book about mental health, on one hand, about muddling through in rural places. But one of the keys for writing this book was connecting his bipolar to the landscape itself, of understanding “bipolar” as a kind of metaphor, especially its connection to place. It’s strange to say that a place as flat and seemingly stable as the Upper Midwest is bipolar, but the swings of weather, of markets, of long stretches of boredom followed by mania of harvest, for example—it became a way to think about life in the place. Especially bipolar 2, which is a lot more of just muddling through the doldrums.

And in the book that bipolar view also gets tied into your view of God. Would you talk about that a bit?

Yeah, it certainly became a way to view God. My grandfather kind of epitomized the angry, distant father—and, to fit all the Calvinist clichés, that combination of tight, greedy, and pious. Dad set out to be the opposite, I think, and all of us kids saw that he did. So that gave me this huge divide for thinking about God—especially considering how our fathers can shade our understanding of who God is.

Flannery O’Connor is quoting Feuerbach, I think, when she says that we tend to remake God in our own image. She means it in that way that reveals our own selfishness—we literally restructure the world so it serves us. This is one of the things I love about her writing, how it exposes us. But it can cut both ways, I think. Sure, having an angry, distant father certainly impacted Dad’s view of God. But having a lively, raucous, bear-hugging father impacted ours. My specific faith tradition tries to be very particular, very boundaried with our sense of God. I also love the Chesterton quote that “God is strong enough to exult in monotony. Every morning he says ‘Do it again.’” So the kind of manic energy that Dad had—how could you say that it was bad? We loved that energy, it energized us, revitalized our lives. I wanted to take that image of my father and place it on God to see what the results were.

And yet you’ve titled this Brooding Upon the Waters.

Well, yeah, because bipolar 2 has way more downs. The title actually showed up very late in the writing. Last year at Dordt where I teach, the theology department announced that they would be reading the entirety of Calvin’s Institutes during the academic year and invited people to join them. And I thought, that’s crazy. But there are all these people that hate and love Calvin and I’ve lived with all of these church practices and ways of thinking that I’m told are Calvinist—so let’s go. I signed up.

And it was kind of crazy to do. But despite plenty of stuff I’d say he’s wrong about, Calvin is pretty impressive on the Holy Spirit. It reminded me of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I didn’t expect at all. And it brought me back to the book. There’s a lot of discussion of fathers and how they affect our picture of God. And there’s plenty about being a son and carrying burdens and of being locked into the suffering of the world. But looking back at what I had written, it’s the spirit that I find the most hopeful and mysterious and both consistent and capricious. When I think about the silence on the water, or the wild wind on the water, or the teeming nature of creation, or the miraculous catch of fish, which I read as literally creeping out the disciples—like my God, the bounty of this, relent!—I thought, it’s the Holy Spirit that’s been the star of my experience. Not the star. Subtle and silent, yet active and at times raucous and like fostering everything in the entire cosmos. So I was literally thinking of Genesis 1 in the title. But then there’s “Minnesota” itself, which can mean “sky-tinted waters” or “cloudy waters”—Layli Long Soldier even translates it “turbid waters.” And then of course there’s Hopkins and the brooding of the Holy Ghost in “God’s Grandeur.” And that brought me to Brooding Upon the Waters and really changed everything.

This isn’t a book with very many answers. There’s a kind of doom or one might say predestiny lurking over the book. How do you think about that aspect of the book?

That’s a good question. I was told by Paula Huston, an early reader of the manuscript, that it was dark but good. It’s funny because my particular Christian tradition is known for triumphalism—triumphal Calvinists, talk about a conundrum. But Dad’s story was really one with no solution. It was really an “uneasy truce” that we lived with. That was the best we could hope for. I mean, if we could go back and get him balanced meds and therapy, would it have changed everything? I’m not so sure. And I’m not sure that in that tradeoff, we wouldn’t have lost things. Not that it’s a zero sum game—living with mental illness or life itself—but there is a lot in life with no solution, no triumph, there is just living through. As one of my colleagues says, it’s being aware of the problem of grace in the midst of the problem of evil. That’s maybe the best we can hope for, an eye for the beauty of the moment, no matter how fleeting.

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